Teile in June 2009

Puppies grow fast. Teile ("Tei" for his sister TeiPu, "Le" for his brother LeRoy) was born March 13, and here he is early in June -- a couple of weeks after we first saw him at a flea market outside Shepherdsville, Kentucky -- a suburb of Louisville. A full Shih Tzu, this unusual little white beast has touches of brindle coloring on eartips. We suspect that when it's all over with he'll grow to be a little larger than the 10 pounds estimated by his breeder. There's more about our flea market dog in other blog posts. (more following the break.)

You're never quite sure what your puppy is going to look like. In retrospect you wish that instead of just chatting with the breeder about their best guesses that you had insisted on meeting the folks or at least getting their photos. In the rush though, we sure didn't think about it. Teile was too cute to resist.

When we got home though, we tracked through the paperwork full of wonder, and sent off for information from kennel associations. Though one doesn't get information about weight or size this way, both parents seem to have had mixes of white and brindle (brown) in them. The text descriptions didn't fully match the sense of nearly all white that we see in Teile, and that was apparent in his brothers and sisters.

Teile hails from a small town called Glasgow Kentucky. It's a smallish town in southern Kentucky with about 6,000 households.